43% call Obamacare ‘mostly negative’ for America

Approval and disapproval of Obamacare follows partisan lines in survey

It’s too early to know if Obamacare has been good or bad for Americans, experts say — but as of right now the boos from the public far outnumber the cheers.

When asked to think about their health insurance situation and their ability to access quality health care, just 12% of Americans felt better about this than they did last year, while 20% felt worse, according to a survey released Wednesday by Bankrate.com. And many think that could be due to Obamacare: Almost two out of three Americans don’t think the Affordable Care Act has had a positive impact on American lives, with 43% saying they think the ACA has had a mostly negative impact and 21% saying they think it hasn’t made much, if any, impact.

Fewer than one-third of Americans (28% to be exact) say that the ACA has had a mostly positive impact, according to the survey, which polled a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adults living in the U.S., some of whom had Obamacare and others who didn’t.

“The administration is saying it’s a big success, but the negative feelings are strong still and entrenched,” says Bankrate.com insurance analyst Doug Whiteman. “They’re not recovering from the bungled rollout and the negative political messaging is having a psychological impact [on Americans].”

Not surprisingly in this politically polarized country, those divisions fall along political lines. Of the Americans who felt that Obamacare had had a mostly negative impact on America, 73% of them were Republicans and just 18% were Democrats. Of those who felt mostly positive, 54% were Democrats and just 8% were Republicans.

But while many Americans of both parties — according to this and other surveys — have stated that they don’t think Obamacare is a net good for the nation, most experts say it’s too soon to tell what the impact will be. “I think it’s too early to understand who will ultimately win or lose [with respect to Obamacare],” says Mark Lutes, the chairman of health care and employment law firm Epstein Becker Green. Or as Michael Mahoney, the senior vice president of consumer marketing for private health exchange GoHealth.com puts it, “it’s hard to predict what will happen with this long term.”

Several months into its rollout, supporters and opponents of Obamacare each have ammunition to work with. Obamacare proponents point to the fact that there was a net gain of 9.3 million American adults with health insurance from September 2013 to mid-March and that the share of American adults without insurance dropped from 20.5% to 15.8%, according to Rand Corp.. And, the administration often touts the statistic that roughly 35% of Obamacare enrollees are under 35 — a critical number for keeping costs down, since younger, healthier people don’t run up big health-care bills.

And on the anti-Obamacare side, there are plenty of talking points as well. The rollout of Healthcare.gov included a series of mishaps, including many who couldn’t register when they wanted to, and many who have registered still haven’t paid their premiums. And “the law has a lot of provisions that could drive up costs,” says John Garner, principal at employee benefits consulting company Garner Consulting — among them the elimination of lifetime and annual maximums in insurance policies.

With all the fighting and politics, one simple — and personal — point often gets lost: “One of the most important things is ‘how does this relate to you?,’” says Mahoney. And the picture isn't black and white: some people benefit, others don’t, Garner says — and politics usually don’t play a role in that. Mahoney says that the groups that mostly benefited from Obamacare include people who didn’t have coverage previously because of a pre-existing condition, and people who couldn’t afford it, but now can. Garner says that two other categories of big winners were adult children under 26, who can now stay on their parents insurance longer; and those who had reached their lifetime maximum on their insurance, since such lifetime caps are now banned.

Other groups were or may be hurt by Obamacare, Garner says. Some people are now paying more for their coverage; some had plans they liked canceled and are now paying more for a policy they don’t like. Lutes says that all exchange enrollees could potentially have to pay higher health insurance rates if the right mix of people doesn’t sign up for Obamacare (we have to wait and see on this).

Finally, John Morrow, the executive vice president of iVantage Health Analytics, estimates that about 400 hospitals may close under Obamacare — partially due to the change in reimbursement rates under the Affordable Care Act. That could cause both a loss of jobs (more than 135,000 jobs are directly at risk, Morrow estimates), and consumers may have to travel further for care or change providers. “Some communities may lose their only emergency room,” he says. “They could lose the hub of where care is provided.”

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